The small wooden rowboat bumped against the polished cedar mooring dock with a soft, hollow thud.
Grandmaster Vivienne stood in the boat, holding the frosted oar in one hand while staring at the brass cleat bolted to the dock.
The cleat had been polished to a brilliant, reflective sheen.
Beside it lay a neatly coiled hemp mooring line and a small wooden signpost inscribed with clean, black ink:
【DOCKING BAY 0: RESERVED FOR RESIDENTIAL TENANTS. VISITOR SHUTTLES PLEASE USE BAYS 1 THROUGH 108.】
Vivienne slowly looped her frost-covered painter line around the brass cleat, tying it off with a standard clove hitch.
Her fingers were stiff from ten thousand years of traversing the freezing void beyond the rim of the universe.
Yet as her bare feet stepped onto the five-hundred-year mountain cedar planks of the walkway, a wave of gentle, seventy-four-degree radiant warmth surged through the soles of her feet.
The harsh chill that had penetrated deep into her immortal marrow evaporated in an instant.
Across the western and eastern waiting lounges, one hundred and twenty cosmic sovereigns sat frozen in their folding lawn chairs, their eyes bulging with horror.
Emperor Heng-Luo gripped the armrests of Chair `#001` so tightly his knuckles turned white.
"Who... who is that woman?" whispered Patriarch Yan, leaning across the aisle in a terrified four-decibel murmur. "She arrived in a wooden skiff! She tied her boat to the Sovereign’s private residential cleat! She did not take a deli counter ticket!"
"Silence, fool!" Sovereign Bai-Chen hissed, his white tiger whiskers trembling with primal dread. "Look at her aura! Look at the frost on her hems!"
The gathered gods of the dying universe extended their divine senses toward the woman, only to recoil as if struck by lightning.
The woman possessed no ordinary cultivation stage.
Her soul was carved from the first frost of creation, older than the stars themselves.
The ragged, tattered ermine fur lining her snow-white robes carried the scorch marks of ancient cosmic supernovas and the dried black ichor of primordial void-beasts that had hunted gods in the cradle of the cosmos.
Yet she walked with a slight, exhausted limp, carrying an ancient wooden oar over her shoulder like a tired fisherwoman returning from an empty lake.
Vivienne walked slowly down the central cedar walkway.
At the entrance to the main porch, she paused before a coarse coir doormat.
Stenciled across the fibers in faded yellow paint were three simple words:
*Wipe Your Paws.*
Beside the mat stood a small wicker rack containing several pairs of woven straw slippers, sized neatly from small to large.
From inside the screened porch, a familiar, lazy voice echoed through the warm, cedar-scented air.
"Wipe your boots on the mat, Master. I just swept the deck twenty minutes ago, and space dust is a pain to get out of the floorboards."
Vivienne froze. Her breath caught in her throat.
That voice.
It was completely unchanged.
It carried the exact same sluggish, unmotivated cadence she had listened to every single morning on Solitude Peak ten thousand years ago—the voice of a boy who would rather sleep fourteen hours a day than spend ten minutes practicing sword katas.
Vivienne looked down at her battered boots, coated in the grime of thirty unraveled star clusters.
She meekly stepped onto the coir mat, wiping her soles back and forth with meticulous care.
She kicked off her heavy boots, slipped her feet into a pair of medium-sized straw slippers, and pushed open the lightweight cedar screen door.
The door gave a soft, familiar squeak—the exact same squeak she had neglected to fix on her mountaintop shack ten thousand years ago.
Inside the screened enclosure, the geostationary porch opened into a wide, comfortable domestic paradise.
A hand-woven Brazilian cotton hammock swayed gently at a steady three-point-two-second rhythm.
Inside the hammock, Felix Vance was lying on his side, his straw hat resting across his brow, holding a warm celadon teacup in one hand while casually tapping his glowing AetherDeck with the other.
Beside the hammock, Barnaby sat upon his brass perch.
The clockwork owl tilted his head, giving a series of rapid, joyful clicks against his black rubber stopper, his internal gears purring like a well-oiled spinning wheel.
On the pine dining table sat a steaming cast-iron kettle, a dish of sliced honeydew melon, a plate of warm pumpkin buns, and a second celadon cup filled with steaming amber tea.
And beneath the southeast corner of the table, firmly wedged between the pine leg and the cedar floorboards, rested the Sovereign Heart Seal—the primordial root key of reality itself.
Vivienne stood in the center of the porch, clutching her wooden oar like a walking stick, her piercing silver eyes darting from the tea kettle, to the owl, to the seal, and finally to the boy in the hammock.
"Felix?" she whispered, her voice cracking with a mixture of disbelief, relief, and profound bewilderment.
Felix pushed his straw hat up with one finger, squinting at her through the soft afternoon sunlight.
"Hey, Master," Felix said casually, taking a slow sip of tea. "You were gone a while. Did you find the tea you went out for, or did you get lost in the mountains again?"
Vivienne stared at him. Her left eyebrow twitched violently.
"Did I... get lost in the mountains?" Vivienne repeated, her voice rising half an octave before she remembered the Five-Decibel Mandate and hastily clamped her teeth together.
She took a deep, steadying breath, stepping toward the hammock with trembling strides.
"Felix Vance," she hissed in a fierce, furious whisper. "I have been gone for ten thousand years! I traversed the Outer Void! I breached the boundary walls of the Seventh Heavens! I fought the Abyssal World-Devourers in the graveyard of dead realities!"
Felix nodded slowly, setting his teacup down on the cedar side table.
"Right, right, typical MMO developer questline," Felix murmured. "They send you out on a three-minute fetch quest for tea leaves, and suddenly you're stuck in a massive, unskippable expansion cutscene across forty different zones."
He pointed toward the wicker chair beside his hammock.
"Sit down, Master. Your tea is getting cold. I made bitter bamboo leaf with extra honey, just how you like it."
Vivienne looked down at the steaming celadon cup on the pine table.
She picked it up with trembling hands, bringing the rim to her lips.
The fragrance hit her senses immediately: wild bamboo harvested from the southern ridge of Solitude Peak, paired with the rich, soothing sweetness of pure solar honey.
It was the exact tea she had brewed for him on the morning she had departed into the void.
She took a sip.
The liquid was locked at a sublime sixty-eight-point-five degrees.
The moment it touched her throat, the deep, agonizing spiritual wounds she had carried for three hundred centuries—the frost of the Great Void, the erosion of the cosmic entropy storm—dissolved into pure, fragrant warmth.
Her ancient, exhausted meridians expanded with soothing, effortless vitality.
【Host Telemetry: Master Yu Jingshuang consumed [Solitude Comfort Brew]. Internal Meridian Frost: 100% Thawed. Stress Levels: Normalized. Welcome Home Buff Applied: +50% Relaxation.】
Vivienne slowly lowered the cup, staring down into the amber liquid with wide, tear-filled eyes.
"Felix..." she whispered softly, her knuckles white against the porcelain. "What... what have you done to this place?"
"Just basic base-building, Master," Felix replied with a careless shrug, settling deeper into his hammock. "You left the front door unlocked when you left, the roof had a leak over the bookshelf, and the dining table had this awful quarter-inch wobble that made all my soup spill. So I did some DIY renovations."
Vivienne slowly turned her head toward the porch railing.
Through the cedar balusters, she looked out across the forty-million-mile expanse of the inner solar system.
The primary sun blazed with serene majesty, encased within a golden Dyson Ring of three hundred and sixty collector nodes.
One hundred and eight dreadnoughts hung like lanterns along the orbital arc.
Three forty-mile-long cosmic star-whales swam peaceful circles through the void, dusting the solar dishes with their tails.
And down on the floating cedar wings, one hundred and twenty galactic emperors—beings who had ruled the cosmos for millions of years—were sitting quietly in folding lawn chairs, politely dabbing honeydew melon juice from their lips with paper napkins.
Vivienne’s hands began to shake so violently that the celadon teacup rattled against its saucer.
"Basic... base-building?" Vivienne croaked, her voice trembling on the edge of hysteria. "You call encasing the primary star in an immortal solar cage 'basic base-building'?"
"It's just a passive heat collection loop," Felix explained patiently, tapping his slate. "The morning chill up here was brutal, and the solar flares kept causing packet loss on my AetherDeck. So I put up some mirrors to automate the daily energy sweep. It was on sale in the crafting menu."
Vivienne dropped into the wicker chair, pressing her palms against her temples as if her skull were about to crack open from metaphysical overload.
"You put up some mirrors..." she muttered into her hands. "The boy put up some mirrors."
Outside the screened porch, Emperor Heng-Luo and Sovereign Bai-Chen watched through the mesh screen with bated breath.
"Look at the ancient master," Heng-Luo whispered in holy awe. "She sits in the presence of the Sovereign, weeping into her tea! Even an ancient god who sailed the outer void on a wooden skiff is reduced to tears by the boundless tranquility of Solitude!"
"Truly," Bai-Chen agreed reverently. "The Stillness Dao has conquered all creation."
Inside the porch, Felix glanced at the corner of his screen, where the red server countdown timer had dropped to twenty-two hours and eighteen minutes.
Felix pulled his straw hat back down over his brow, resting his hands across his stomach.
"Anyway, Master," Felix said, closing his eyes with a satisfied yawn. "Drink your tea and have a pumpkin bun. The developers are threatening a massive server wipe tomorrow, so I'm trying to get all my naps in before they break the physics engine."
Vivienne slowly lowered her hands from her face, staring at her disciple in profound, absolute silence.
For ten thousand years, she had searched the ends of the universe for the key to saving reality from destruction.
And the entire time, the key had been lying in a hammock on her back porch, drinking tea and complaining about server maintenance.